I’m not someone who makes New Year’s resolutions as I don’t believe you need a new year for a new start, you can make changes anytime! However, I have found January a good month for reflecting on 2024 and planning for success in 2025. I wasn’t going to share my goals for 2025 publicly, however, I will likely be the foundation for future blog posts so I decided I should summarize them here.
In this post, I’ll be sharing how to set and achieve your personal goals in 2025 and I’ll also share my own priorities.
Disclaimer: this post contains affiliate links, if you shop through one of my links, I may earn a small commission. There is no additonal cost to you and I’ll be extremely grateful!
HOW TO SET YOURSELF ACHIEVABLE GOALS
When setting goals for 2025, start by thinking about what’s most important to you. What are your key values and priorities are. I encourage you to do this away from social media. Like it or not we are influenced by the accounts we follow! I follow a lot of travel accounts but I have decided that for the first time, travel is not one of my main priorities. I will explain why at the end of this post.
You’re more likely to achieve goals based on the area you’re passionate about. You can keep them quite broad to start with. Some popular areas to focus on include:
- Career – (starting your own business, getting a promotion or a new job)
- Family Time
- Self Growth / Personal Development – (learning a new skill)
- Health & Fitness – (eating better and exercising more)
- Sorting out your Finances
- Self Care
- Environmental Impact
- Travel
Once you’ve defined your core values, write them down, and choose however many you feel comfortable with. I’ve picked five which I think is quite a lot, however, for some of the areas I’m already quite happy with, I’d just like to focus a little bit deeper on them.
I believe the way to make your goals achievable is to take small steps, and gradually make little changes to your lifestyle that will add up to a big difference in your overall well-being.
Setting yourself small, realistic goals within your focus area, that you can actually achieve is the key to success.
For example, if one of your key areas is fitness. It’s probably unrealistic that you’re going to start going to the gym every day, you’ll likely get off to a good start then start to suffer from burnout. A more realistic goal is to do a fitness class once a week. Taking the stairs rather than the lift is a great example of a tiny change you can easily do.
Once these small changes become habits, you can expand on them if you wish. For example, one fitness class is going well so you also add a home workout once a week.
Personal Example: I’m a stay-at-home mum to two small children. Last year, I was really struggling with overwhelm, we’d just moved from NYC to London and, trying to sort out our new home on top of looking after two little boys and everything else was a lot to handle.
Breaking down what exactly caused me to feel overwhelmed and working out how to fix those areas, changed my whole way of life and was so much better for me mentally. Here’s what I did:
- Slowed down – most weekends seemed to be filled with family obligations (Christmas, birthdays etc.) Weekends were the only time my husband was available to help out with the kids. We had to slow down and say no to some things. That was hard, as I like to please everyone, but sometimes you have to put yourself first.
- Decluttered – I couldn’t cope with constantly trying to tidy all the kid’s toys. Broken toys, duplicate toys, toys they didnt use anymore all had to go. I prefer being out doing fun things with my kids than being at home so I focused more on that.
- Batched Cooked – I found preparing meals with my kids around so stressful. Taking some time out to batch cook, meant I had dinners ready to put in the oven and that small change felt like a huge difference to the end of my day!
SETTING MY GOALS FOR 2025
Below are my focus areas/goals for 2025 and the small changes I’m going to make to achieve them:
HEALTH
Good health is something everyone wants. Below are my small changes to improve my family’s overall health:
- Daily Vitamins – we give the kids their recommended daily vitamins (toddler & child linked) but my husband and I will also start taking a daily vitamin. As well as an immune boost tablet.
- Eating Five a Day—Again, the kids get five a day (I’m constantly chopping fruit for them), but I don’t think I do every day. I’m going to make a conscious effort to ensure I get all five.
- Filtered Water – we started this last year and will continue this year. Our neighbour bought us a water filter as apparently, London water is really bad for you. (I haven’t done my own research on this but the filtered water tastes much better).
- Researching small changes we can easily make – for example, chopping potatoes to make chips rather than using frozen store-bought ones.
- More Healthy Snacks – my kids love to snack, and as we are on the go a lot, store-bought snacks are an easy option. I would really like to make sure the majority of their snacks are healthy choices.
- More Healthy Meals – we’re not bad at cooking healthy meals but there’s room for improvement here.
SUSTAINABILITY
I think everyone should try to take care of our planet. We already do the basics such as recycling but I think we can make other small improvements to be more sustainable. I’m going to look at switching to more environmentally friendly household and beauty products.
I also started using Vinted last year (both for selling and buying) and plan to continue using it in the future.
SELF-CARE
Self-care seems to be something every mum struggles to make time for.
Writing this blog is a form of self-care for me and I’ve managed to get into a good routine of making time for it and want to stick with it.
I’m setting up two new, small things here that I hope I can stick to! Firstly, fashion and style are things I love, since having kids my body has changed, and I’d like to update my wardrobe and make it something I am completely happy with again.
Secondly, I want to start getting my nails done, or even doing them myself! Since my second baby, I’ve not made time for this at all and I always want to! So I need to create time for that in my schedule!
FINANCE
We’re pretty happy with how we currently manage our finances.
Next year (or maybe the year after) we’d like to move house. Buying a house/ apartment in London is a huge expense and we’re going to start preparing for that now so I felt like I should still list it as a focus.
BALANCE
Getting the right balance in all of the above is key. It will also be quite difficult. Everyone is short on time and researching, healthy recipes, sustainable products, and writing blog posts all take up valuable time.
I plan to be more intentional with using the time I do have and focus less on the time I don’t have. For example, I know I’m not very productive in the evening, by the time my kids are in bed, I’m not going to sit down and write a blog post but this would be a good time to browse Pinterest for healthy recipes.
TRAVEL
Finally, I wanted to mention travel. Anyone who knows me will be shocked to hear travel is not one of my main priorities for this year!
Travel will always be a priority for our family, however, this year, my husband isn’t travelling so much for work and as my eldest has started school, we are restricted to the expensive school holidays for the first time. We will of course continue to explore but it’s likely we’ll take one or two fewer trips this year and I feel fine about that!
Last year, we’d just moved from New York to London. We also spent two weeks exploring Montenegro and did city breaks to Dubrovnik, Paris, Rome and Cambridge. (click on them to read my travel guides!) We also visited family in Surrey and South Wales. To be honest, that’s a lot! Doing one or two less will benefit us financially and I think help with balance overall.
It’s completely OK for your priorities to change over time!
Thank you for reading this post on setting goals for 2025. I hope it has been useful to you, I feel like writing it has been helpful to me!
Here’s to a happy healthy 2025,
